Profile: Steve Smith

Personal background
My name is Steve Smith and I am the founder of Gold IRA For Investors dot com.
Apart from helping people to take a smart decision when it comes to choosing the right hedge for their retirement we support SETI at Home in the search for life outside our planet. The following paragraphs are some conclusions you can find in our website. I hope you enjoy them.

America is an entrepreneurial cornucopia, and over the decades I have watched countless precious metals IRA companies come into being—and a fair amount fall away. The Internet represents that rare thing, a genuine secular earthquake that has been rearranging the business landscape. In a turbulent but nonetheless fruitful period for American capitalism, new firms have arisen to meet new needs, and technology has developed from being a discreet sector to a deeply embedded yet evolving process within each company. Along the way, investor interest in the stock market has surged.

Consistent with the experience across Wall Street, numerous analysts have jumped in and out of our firm over the years in pursuit of more lucrative opportunities.

First as my firm’s associate research director and later as director of research, I helped shepherd new analysts into the industry. Along the way, I participated in launching many new and existing companies into coverage. Given the investing excitement attached in particular to the Internet but really much more widespread, I found myself initiating coverage in nearly every industry and sector in preparation for or in assistance to industry-specific analysts.

Over these years, my first step has always been to study each precious metals IRA company to fully understand how they work and how the protect your assets, and only then issue an opinion on the underlying companies. In a second derivative variation on the journalist’s aphorism—“I need to read what I’ve written in order to know what I’m thinking” —I discovered that I need to model in detail so I can determine what I’ll write and only then learn what I am thinking.

Along the way, we’ve trialed all the different ways to skin a cat: top-down and bottom-up modeling and valuation; percentage-of-sales and segment-driven operating income statements; comparable historical and peer group valuation; dividend discount and discounted free cash f low valuation. Eventually, what emerged was a modeling and valuation template that was rigorous and consistent within the company composite but sufficiently flexible to accommodate new data inputs and new ways to skin those cats.

That said, this is the model now, and we’re sticking to it. We find it works best, at least fresh out of the box, when it is constructed according to the template.

Anecdote time: Three days before Christmas one year, I yanked the pieces of my son’s bike from the box, too cheap to pay Toys“R”Us to assemble it for me. It looked simple enough, and I didn’t have time to read what the manufacturer (what does he know?) had to say about putting it together. Two days later, in a frazzled state, I wheeled the semidilapidated bike under the Christmas tree. As the front wheel swung to the side into (wobbly) kickstand pose, the headlamp gave me a doleful look. At that point I realized I would have saved two days of work if I’d “wasted” a few minutes reading the manual. This is our manual, and we don’t recommend straying from the script.

Analysts who’ve gone through any combination of formal and informal training have been saturated in financial theory, highly useful if at times conflicting.

The conflicts in financial academia provide an interesting backdrop. But any such musings are dispelled by the ringing of the phone and the client wanting to know, simply: buy it or sell it? If it seems we demand an almost pedantic precision about the process, it’s because we can’t afford wasted motion if we are going to incorporate and integrate all our data on all our worksheets and get them talking among themselves while still giving the analyst time to talk to clients.

We hope our work over the preceding chapters has helped you answer that endlessly recurring question at the end of the phone line. Along the way, we’ve accomplished much: we have modeled the income statement and other financial statements, and we’ve used historical and modeled data for the company and its peer group to calculate value of the asset. We have made provisions to accommodate the cycle and the ever-widening schism between GAAP and non-GAAP results. We’ve incorporated and weighted all the market’s valuation mechanisms, and we’ve done so in a disciplined and flexible manner. Hopefully, and this is paramount, we’ve left no loose ends in our gold investing.
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